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OPINION

She had that look, the one wives reserve for their husbands when they suspect they’re up to no good.

“What? It’s just a song,” I said. “Jeez.”

I have a habit of listening to music on repeat. I can’t stand background noise when I write so I surround my brain with inescapable beats. Once the conditions are correct, repeating means I don’t need to think about it again and I can remain focused.

It’s nothing new. So I couldn’t understand why she was in my office with The Look.

“Why THIS song?” Family Affair, Mary J. Blige.

“I dunno. Why NOT this song? What is this? Why all these questions?”

“Nothing, I’m just curious, is all.”

“All right, can I get back to work now?”

She nodded with a suspicious smile. And I got back to work... on fixing my Facebook algorithm.

I had just discovered Reels, those annoying but addictive short videos Mark Zuckerberg must turn Facebook into because TikTok exists. I need Facebook for work, but I’ve got enough social media in my life so no TikTok for me, thanks. Yet here it is in my feed.

Marshall Jones, managing editor

It started innocently enough. I clicked on a few and got sucked right in. I was fed a steady diet of comedians, hockey goals and hits, highlight dunks, celebrity interviews and guys fixing stuff.

Most of them though, were pretty girls dancing, of course. That’s who social media was invented for. That week, sororities around the US were doing some sort of dance challenge to start the school year. So I mean it was A LOT of girls. Family Affair was one of the favourite songs.

Ok? That’s where I got it from! Happy now?

They’re intoxicating, these videos. Beautiful young women smiling and dancing. Look, this one’s dancing with a skipping rope, that’s pretty cool. Cosplay? That’s awesome, let’s see that again. That’s kinda funny, but why is she telling jokes dressed like that?

And that’s how it happened. I clicked on too many girls. The dudes showing me drywall tips disappeared. Rednecks suddenly stopped getting their toys stuck in mud. No more random amateur rappers.

Instead the Reels were just showing more women posing, not even much dancing anymore. No jokes, no talents. Just pretty and out there. Basically softcore porn on Facebook, every Reel now a large-breasted scantily-clad woman in running shoes enticing me to click so they could show me their tricks.

I could have just left it. But I don’t want the creepy-old-man algorithm following me around the internet so I had to go through Reels again, avoiding all glorious temptation of dancing blondes and brunettes and redheads, skipping them as fast as I could, leaving the comedians and tool guys and extreme cleaners and animal rescues. I had mostly fixed my ratio.

But the song stuck.

And that’s when my wife turned The All-Knowing Facebook Algorithm into a Family Affair.

“Why THIS song?"

I straight up panicked. I admitted nothing about dancing college girls, shushed her out of the room and turned up the volume to cover the outside noise.

Like Queen Mary says, I don’t need that drama in my life.

— Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca

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